Incentives for subscribing to a site

Good, common sense stuff. I am new to blogs and this is what I need to read. I have had no success in having subscribers. I will try some of your ideas.

I'm really going to have to consider the topic of subscriptions a little more, I didn't even think I had any subscribers until the other day and I would feel bad to have them think that I don't care about them. I mean after all, they subscribed without me having to ask them. On the whole, I agree with you about 'added-value' incentives... they're only going to be more likely to unsubscribe if they subscribed to get something out of it.

So far, because I religiously check blog that I like to read I haven't had any reason to subscribe to anyone's feed. The only blog I've been considering subscribing to is entrecard's because their planned outages never seem planned to me because I don't check the blog everyday. But if I did buy into this whole subscription thing, character and content would be my main reasons for signing up!

Ben,

There are 2 reasons I'll subscribe to a site.

1. I like the content. If the information is helpful or entertaining... I enjoy reading it.

2. Subscribing via RSS is convenient for me because I can quickly read many posts. No need to bounce from blog to blog.

I have subscribed for the free gift, but I'll check out the content first. If you aren't careful your RSS reader can become cluttered real fast.

I have never understood why people are so obsessed with increasing their subscriber count if they have to bribe people to do it. It becomes a meaningless figure if folks aren't really reading it or don't have any interest.

I would much rather have a lower subscriber count with a high reach than an artificially inflated subscription figure.

SB

I'd consider subscribing to your site as I do like reading each of your articles and would not like to miss something for subscribers only. But, I just do not have the time/ energy to read blogs and then go to a feed reader for more. Doing it by feed alone isn't the way I want to go either.

The main thing I can say in favour of subscribing to feeds are plain text posts which let you skip the ads and massive files (YouTube and etc) on the blog site itself.

At the end of the day I don't think I will get into feed reading/ subscribing for the same reason I'm not buying a cell phone. I want time for myself versus being available for the rest of the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, I guess I will miss some blog posts and a ton of sales calls. My family already know to email me rather than phone at all. I can live with that. :)

Steve - glad you found it useful. Have a read of the other sections on my site, especially Blogging Guide and Tutorials, as I have lots of other tips elsewhere. :)

fragileheart - subscribing is a convenience. Of course you can still continue to visit the sites one by one if that works for you. I've just found that as I start reading more sites, it would be a lot harder to use this method of keeping up. Subscriptions are great for sites that do not update daily or indeed on any predictable schedule. While I think that most sites should try to update on a regular basis (e.g. always on the same day) I know that many do not. In fact my blog over at Injader is one such site - it gets updated when there is something to say. Having a lot of sites to visit every day seems like a waste of time if half of them don't update every time you visit. Also, there's no easy way to keep track of the posts you've commented on without being flooded with emails or bookmarking every post. I use starred items in Google Reader and it make it so easy. :)

Keith - I'm in agreement with all of your points.

Scott - agreed. My subscriber count is much more valuable to me than it might be if I ran lots of contests with subscription as an entry requirement.

Laura - the theory is that you wouldn't go to the blogs to read them, you'd read in your feed reader. No need to do it twice. However, you'd still need to go to the site to drop your Entrecard. You'd need to go to the site to comment. And some sites don't put the full contents of their posts in the feed. I counter this by having a daily drops list that I go through quickly, then reading the new posts in Google Reader, then commenting on anything I like as I go. I don't always have a lot to say in reply to posts, so commenting doesn't take all that long to do. As for the feeling of being "in demand", a feed reader is basically the same as email in the sense you only check it when you want to. It doesn't alert you like a phone does. I'm sure there are some readers that will alert you but I would never use that feature. I read sites when the time is right for me, and I am certainly not available 24/7 when it comes to reading other people's sites. Using a feed reader actually saves me an enormous amount of time and with time being so hard to come by, I'll do everything I can to get back some free time where I can. But each to their own - different people have different ways of using the web. :)

Thanks for the comments!